Have Twenty-Something Single Women Closed the Pay Gap?

Women earn less than men, right? Not, it turns out, among a very specific set of women and men: "In 2008," reports Conor Dougherty
of The Wall Street Journal, "single, childless women between ages 22
and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S.
cities." Reach Advisors, a consumer-research firm, crunched the
numbers from the Census Bureau to arrive at this statistic. Women's incomes in this
group are "8% greater on average," largely due to their greater rate of
obtaining college degrees. But what do these numbers mean? Are they
evidence that the pay gap is being closed, that men are falling behind,
or that childlessness is more required than ever for a woman to
succeed?

Women
Only Ahead When It Doesn't Count as Much "Women may have a pay
advantage for a brief period, but that advantage disappears when the
real power and money are on the table," observes 24/7 Wall St.'s Douglas McIntyre.

The
unfortunate side of the pay picture for women is that companies recruit
and put women into middle management jobs where they make as much as
their male counterparts, especially in the ten or fifteen years after
college. The situation changes swiftly as the two groups reach the
point at which they can climb into upper management. The number of
studies that show that women cannot make it into top jobs and on boards
of directors are legion. What appears to be a trend with promise when
women are young is cut off as they move higher on the corporate ladder.

That May Change Time's Belinda Luscombe,
under a headline including the words "at last," appears more
celebratory. She talks to one of the authors of the study, James
Chung of Reach Advisors. Apparently, Chung thinks the effect of
childbearing may change: he "believes that women now may have enough
leverage that their financial gains may not be completely erased as
they get older." Also, Luscombe points out, the cause and effect here
isn't quite what it seems: women are making more earlier because they
are highly educated, and "highly educated women tend to marry
and have children later." Thus, those with more earning power are also
the ones more likely to be "single and childless" in their twenties.

What About the Men?Carrie Lukas
at National Review finds Luscombe's tone "troubling," in that it
"suggests that we should all be celebrating the idea of women
dominating the workplace." It's good that women are doing well, Lukas
says, but "all of us--men and women alike--should be concerned if men's
prospects dim." She's also concerned that "women's higher earnings may actually be a symptom of hardship: More
women are having to work more since the men in their lives can't
provide for the family alone or because they are providing for
themselves." Lukas also has another interesting notion: the numbers, on the other hand, are "good news" in that they "should put to rest the idea that the traditional wage gap has been a product of sexism."